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For decades after the Holocaust, liberal democracies patted themselves on the back as the ultimate firewall against the world’s oldest hatred. Constitutional protections, free media, pluralism and the ‘never again’ mantra would keep the beast chained forever. What a load of self-deluding bollocks that turned out to be.
The rise of open antisemitism in Australia should be setting off alarm bells at full volume. This is not just a ‘Jewish issue’, though even that ought to alarm us enough: it’s an issue for all of us. “First they came for the Jews,” as Martin Niemöller lamented.
Antisemitism has often been described as the “canary in the coalmine” of a society’s political and moral health. As the former British chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks once warned: “The appearance of antisemitism in a culture is the first symptom of a disease, the early warning sign of collective breakdown.”
Australia is now, shockingly, Exhibit A.
The worst antisemitic massacre on our soil, 15 dead at Bondi Beach last December, was no aberration. For years, antisemitism had dominated rising incidences of hate crimes. It only ramped up after October 7, 2023. Spontaneous celebrations in Muslim Western Sydney, followed by the officially unresisted Islamic Nuremberg rally on the steps of the Opera House. When authorities did nothing, or worse, lied and pandered to the antisemites, it was the green light for the years of horror that have followed.
Jewish schools vandalised, synagogues firebombed, businesses targeted and Jews abused in the streets and doxxed online. All of it cheer-led by the darlings of the chattering elite, with no push-back either from the chatterers or the authorities.
A royal commission into antisemitism shouldn’t have even been necessary in 2026. Yet here we are.
The comfortable post-war story was that antisemitism was a relic of illiberal Europe, banished by enlightened democracy. History begs to differ. In the 19th century, Germany was a sanctuary for the Jewish diaspora, a place of relative tolerance and opportunity. Jews thrived.
Then came the Weimar Republic: hyperinflation, moral collapse, cultural decadence and a society in freefall. Antisemitism didn’t create the crisis. The crisis revived it.
Historians Richard Hamilton and Jürgen Falter have shown that even most rank-and-file Nazis in the 1930s weren’t frothing ideologues obsessed with Jews. They were bandwagon-jumpers: ordinary Germans drawn by economic despair, national humiliation and the promise of order and the restoration of national pride. The really genocidal antisemitism only ramped up as Germany’s self-inflicted crisis of World War II engulfed the nation. Antisemitism wasn’t the disease. It was a symptom of deeper rot.
Sound familiar?
The question we must now confront is an uncomfortable reality: what if the resurgence of antisemitism is not merely a failure of liberal democracies, but evidence of deeper moral and intellectual decay within them?
Australia isn’t Weimar, yet, although Albo, Zippy and Boofhead are doing their level best to plunge us into a similar economic abyss. The societal pressures are unmistakable and entirely inflicted by the elite class.
Decades of mass immigration, especially from Islamic countries where Jew-hatred is baked into the curriculum and the culture, have strained social cohesion to breaking point. The economic and social fallout from Covid policies, the lockdowns and the mandates that shattered trust in the political class, left scars that haven’t healed.
For decades before that, the post-WWII liberal order that once delivered stability has been quietly white-anted by the Long March Left and its New World Order of uniparty globalism. Open borders, endless foreign wars, identity politics and a ruling class that lectures battlers from the sanctuary of its gated compounds, while importing the very problems it refuses to name.
If antisemitism is the canary in the coalmine of a society’s political and moral health, the canary has dropped off its perch. Worse, the canary is coughing up blood on Sydney streets and Melbourne campuses. And the perpetrators are still bullshitting us that it’s just ‘criticism of Israel’, like a pet shop owner nailing a dead parrot to its perch.
Nowhere has this collapse of moral clarity been more evident than after the atrocities of October 7.
The worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust should have produced universal outrage and solidarity. Instead, in many supposedly enlightened circles, it was rationalised, contextualised or even celebrated. Before Israel had even responded militarily, mobs were already gathering in Western cities cheering Hamas and accusing Israel of blood libels, like “genocide”.
That reaction revealed something profoundly troubling about the condition of liberal democracies today.
This isn’t fringe extremism any more. It’s mainstreaming in institutions that once defended liberal values: academia, media, politics, the arts... Cloaked in the language of ‘human rights’, ‘decolonisation’ and ‘social justice’, Jews are recast as uniquely privileged oppressors. Israel is held to standards no other nation faces. Australian Jews are held collectively guilty for its actions.
The deeper truth of all this is even uglier than antisemitism itself.
Australia’s experiment in rapid demographic change without integration has produced exactly the fractures social-cohesion theorists warned about. Covid authoritarianism exposed how quickly ‘liberal democracy’ can discard its principles. Economic stagnation, housing shortages and a sense that the country no longer belongs to its historic people have left too many grasping for simple explanations. The uniparty’s refusal to defend Australian values first has created a vacuum that imported hatreds are only too happy to fill.
History shows where this road leads. Jews are never the last target. When antisemitism thrives, tolerance, the rule of law and basic moral clarity erode for everyone. The fight isn’t just for Jewish safety. It’s a test of whether Australia still possesses the will to defend its own civilisation.
The canary is singing its lungs out. The question is whether anyone in power still has ears to hear.
